The National Board: Challenged by Success?

As more earn credential, some say value could diminish.

With the number of teachers who have
won certification from the National Board
for Professional Teaching Standards expected
to reach 60,000 by year’s end, the credential
has become a fixed part of the education
scene. But the group’s success raises at
least one new troubling question about the
certification’s future value, and fails to allay
policy concerns about the millions of dollars
that states and districts spend on teachers
who win the certification.

The past few years, especially, have seen
sharp growth in the number of teachers who
have tackled the demanding process. The figures
have been spurred by rewards for the
credential from more than 30 states and
scores of districts. National-board officials
say that if the current trend continues, about
2 percent of the nation’s teachers will hold
the credential by 2008.

Still, the 20-year-old, privately organized
NBPTS might be challenged by success. For
instance, as more teachers seek the certification,
will its worth slip?

Teachers’ Motivation

Noting that links between master’s degrees
and teacher effectiveness may once
have existed but for the most part no longer
do, some observers have wondered if national
certification might fall into a similar
pattern. Before master’s degrees meant almost
universal automatic pay hikes, fewer
teachers sought the credential. But those
who did were more likely to be effective, researchers
have suggested.

“Anytime you start a new program, it’s
likely to be the enthusiastic,
entrepreneurial people
who are going to go
through it,” and they may
have natural advantages
as good teachers, says
Dan D. Goldhaber, a research
professor at the
University of Washington
in Seattle who has studied
national-board certification.
“Over time, the
applicant pool is not
likely to be as good.”

By all accounts, salary
rewards for certification
have upped interest. Legislators
in Washington state, for example,
raised the base bonus for board certification
this year from $3,500 to $5,000 annually and
offered an additional $5,000 annually to nationally
certified teachers at high-poverty schools. The number of applicants
doubled from previous years,
Washington officials said.

“I worry about the motivation,
of course,” said Sarah Applegate,
a nationally certified teacher-librarian
at River Ridge High
School in Lacey, Wash. “People
have said to me, ‘I hear I can
make $10,000 extra if I work in a
high-needs school—where are the
high-needs schools?’ That’s not
good enough.”

But on the whole, she said, the
new incentives will draw more
teachers to undertake the
process, and that will be a plus
for students.

Mr. Goldhaber doesn’t disagree—
as long as the national
board sticks to its standards. In
the case of master’s degrees, he
said, the press of teachers going
after a salary increase gave universities
the opportunity, even the
incentive, to collect tuition without
necessarily delivering much of
value to the classroom. Few who
take courses flunk.

Process Scrutinized

In contrast, only around 40 percent
of first-time applicants pass
the national board’s assessments,
according to the Arlington,Va.-based group. Eventually, about
two-thirds of those who resubmit
revised work achieve the credential.
Those percentages have
stayed stable for some time.

Joseph A. Aguerrebere Jr., the
chief executive officer of the national
board, said quantity has
not had an effect on quality.
What’s more, he suggests that the
growing number of nationally credentialed
teachers has helped the
national board play a larger role
in improving teaching and reforming
schools.

“I’d say the worth is actually
growing as people learn about it,”
Mr. Aguerrebere said.

Nonetheless, teachers with and
without the credential, along with
researchers, are certain that the
best teachers are not necessarily
nationally certified.

“I think there are a lot of accomplished
teachers out there who are
not board-certified,” said Jennifer
Morrison, a nationally certified
high school teacher in Chapin, S.C.
“I always have to worry [that] it’s
become a brand name.”

Other teachers go further, questioning
the degree to which the
process can be manipulated. The
extensive assessment requires
teachers to compile four portfolios
of classroom materials, including
two videotapes of their teaching,
and take six tests that ask teachers
to apply their knowledge to
classroom situations at their grade
level and in their subject area.

“Teachers may appear one way
on video and another way the majority
of the time, and that concerns
me,” said Suzanne A. Newsom,
who teaches English at the
Renaissance School of Olympic
High School in Charlotte, N.C.
She is waiting to hear if resubmissions
of two of the 10 elements
required by the board will win her
the credential. She passed the
videotaped portions on the first
round.

Elaine Kasmer, a high school
art teacher in Baltimore County,
Md., who entered the profession
after a career as an illustrator,
thinks she knows why some of the
best teachers pass up the chance
for certification. They view it “as a
sort of bureaucratic, jump-through-the-hoops thing that is a
drain on their teaching,” Ms. Kasmer
said.

Practiced observers of accomplished
teaching say that in their
experience, however, people who
win certification are indeed topnotch
teachers. “The people I
know with [national] certification
are wonderful teachers,” said Pam
Wise, a veteran teacher who is
currently a school coach with the
Coalition of Essential Schools
Northwest Center in Tacoma,
Wash. “And people I know who
weren’t [wonderful] didn’t make
the cut.”

One question is whether the extensive
assessment changes a
teacher’s practice for the better
over the long haul.

In a 2004 paper, Mr. Goldhaber
reported that while North Carolina
teachers who later receive
national certification start out as
more effective than other teachers
in raising student test scores,
they are less effective the year of
the application process. And
though they are more effective
than other teachers in the first
year after certification, the effect
wanes thereafter.

Overall, there is more research
evidence that the credential signals
effectiveness, especially
when it comes to educating poor
and minority children in the
lower grades, than that the
process makes better teachers.

Those who have earned the credential,
however, overwhelmingly
report in a survey underwritten
by NBPTS and informally that undergoing
the assessment improved
their practice.

But other research he has done,
he said, showed that the effects of
professional development may
take several years to appear, years
beyond the scope of most recent
studies. “There are lots of indicators
to show we should be patient,
and keep doing these studies,” the
researcher contended.

With some exceptions, teachers
who know of national certification
tend to have a positive impression
of its value. But for some it seems
beyond their reach in a practical
sense. And that speaks to a vexing
problem for the national
board, which has gathered many
more suburban teachers than
urban or rural ones.

“It’s probably something that
can be valuable,” said Matthew F.
McLaughlin, a teacher at the
Bronx Preparatory Charter
School in New York City, “but I
don’t know how it relates to me.
The impression I get every time I
read about it is that it’s something
for a suburban school where
half the faculty has been there a
long time.”

In contrast, Mr. McLaughlin has
had a new principal each of the
six years he has taught in two different
schools, and estimates the
teacher turnover at his current
school at about 25 percent annually.
“It feels like a luxury for a
school like mine, always in startup
mode,” he said.

Targeted Incentives

The national board has been
working to build its presence in
urban and rural schools, and has
had some recent success in drawing
teachers of color in greater proportion
than in the profession generally.
At the same time, Mr.
Goldhaber found in research published
this year that North Carolina
teachers getting the credential
made it more likely they would
move to better-off schools than the
ones where they taught at the time
they applied. Nationally certified
teachers were also more likely to
leave the state, according to the research,
which was supported by
the NBPTS.

The research suggests that
teachers, at least in North Carolina,
recognize that national certification
gives them greater mobility
in the job market and they
take advantage of it. North Carolina
is one of 30 states that allow
transplanted teachers to bypass
state certification requirements if
they have the NBPTS seal.

Some observers of the program
in North Carolina, which has
more than 11,000 teachers with
the advanced certification, the
largest number in the nation,
have criticized it as state subsidization
of better-off school districts.
North Carolina, which tops
up the salaries of nationally certified
teachers by 12 percent, pays
out far less of the salary money
per capita to poor districts because
they have relatively few
such teachers.

But Mr. Harris, the Wisconsin
researcher, said the NBPTS should
not be faulted for a “teacher gap“
problem that crops up no matter
which characteristic of better
teachers is examined.

John N. Dornan, the executive
director of the Public School
Forum of North Carolina, which
includes government and business
leaders, agrees. At the same
time, he acknowledges concern
about getting more nationally certified
teachers into low-performing
schools, especially in North
Carolina’s rural areas. The solution,
he said, is not to suppress
the number of people achieving
national certification but to foster
the conditions that will groom
and keep teachers of that quality
where they are needed most.

“I am looking for how to find
new and different ways to provide
financial incentives and rewards
in poor counties,” Mr. Dornan
said.

A few states have opted to pay
nationally certified teachers
bonuses only when they teach in
high-needs schools: California,
Georgia, and New York. That approach
is not endorsed by the
NBPTS, which argues that it undermines
its fundamental mission
of elevating the teaching profession.
But Mr. Aguerrebere does
favor topping up the base reward
to get more nationally certified
teachers into high-needs schools,
the approach taken by Washington
state.

The national board has also
helped pilot projects to increase
the number of nationally certified
teachers in high-poverty schools
by offering help with the $2,500
assessment fee and support during
the process. Such programs
often work through cohorts of applicants,
which strengthens the
credential’s power to change
teaching practice at a school, national
board officials say.

Other Options

It remains an open question
whether, considered strictly as
professional development, national
certification is the best use
of the money states pour into it.

Ms. Kasmer at Baltimore
County’s Dulaney High School
said she would rather see the outlay
make it possible for teachers
to observe each other regularly
and then debrief what they see,
something that doesn’t happen at
her school.

And yet the national board’s
standards for teaching practice
are used as the basis for just
such activities at some schools,
according to Mr. Aguerrebere.
It shouldn’t be a matter of
either/or, he suggested. Strong
standards and assessments make
sharing among teachers more
meaningful.

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